WITH the thrills, chills and spills of circus missing in action for the last two years, there’s good news as Canberra’s 32-year-old Warehouse Circus, founded by Sonia Young in 1990, gears up for a national circus festival.

Artistic director of the Canberra circus company, Tom Davis, is brimming with enthusiasm about the coming event, which opens later in April under a big top at Kambah.

A self-styled expert hat juggler who first went to Warehouse Circus as a kid in 1997, staying until 2008, when he headed for Melbourne to the National Institute of Circus Arts, Davis later worked around Australia, including with Solid State Circus and Circus Oz until 2014, when he hurt his shoulder badly.

He contacted the then director at Warehouse to ask whether they might have some lighter duties for him and instantly found himself managing their major show. 

Happy to report, Davis’s frozen shoulder – a borderline injury not worth surgery, he says, has been fully rehabilitated, “I can do handstands and a cartwheel again,” he says.

After an on-again off-again relationship with the company, he became artistic director and acting executive director in 2020. Three weeks later, covid hit.

What fun. They tried to present shows and classes on zoom and with a lot of hard work, he believes, “the ship is still afloat; we are still steering it”.

“When we came out of lockdown, we wanted to connect with young circus performers in the networks around Australia, so we thought that running a circus festival was a really good idea,” he says. 

The idea was to get Warehouse Circus alumni such as Jane Schofield and Chris Singer to come back and do masterclasses and, where possible, to engage other circus performers, too.

“We’ve got a number of great people, like ‘Bon Appetit’, a show set in a restaurant full of kitchen-related circus skills, recently seen in Adelaide. 

A highlight for Davis will be magician Nicholas J Johnson in his show “Tricky Nick: Magician and Idiot”. A consultant for everyone from Circus Oz to the prison drama “Wentworth”, he’s the author of a best-selling book “Tricky Nick”, about why magic works and says: “I entertain, educate, and turn my audiences into walking bullshit-detectors”.

“We worked side-by-side in Melbourne,” Davis says, noting that magic and circus go hand-in-hand – “Circus shows you what you are doing, but magic puts all the hard work into not showing how it’s done.”

The festival, he says, is a new event bringing together young circus artists from across Australia to train with and perform alongside elite circus performers, including many home-grown stars such as Elena Kirschbaum, now program director at the Adelaide Fringe Festival’s hub and creative producer at Highwire Entertainment.

Beyond the well-known, out-of-town performances, there will also be a clown show, “The Ridiculous Show”, by local artist Pablo Latona, who was once general manager at Warehouse Circus.

The festival will run in the Lions Youth Haven at Kambah, where they’ll be setting up big tops, including one large enough for gala shows. 

A part of the Youth Haven complex is the Communities@work Galilee School, who have loaned their spaces and resources, so there’ll be catering and dorm accommodation for the young circus artists and, separately, their mentors.

On Saturday, April 23, the festival will hold a free market day with art, craft and food stalls, ticketed masterclasses in circus, free performances all day and free workshops, including workshops catering to Canberrans living with disability.

Of course, circus is not just practice, it’s showbiz, and to that end they will hold “The Great Big Circus Gala(h)” opening and closing shows on April 19 and April 23, mixing visiting acts with up-and-coming talents. 

On closing night, burlesque artist Jazida will have the last laugh with her notorious show, “Decadence and Debauchery”. But that’s just for the 18+ crowd.

Canberra Circus Festival, Lions Youth Haven, Kambah, April 19-23. Details at canberracircusfestival.com.au